Welsh Keywords: Dadweirlled

From Planet 236

by Paul Eastwood

This is the thirty-second contribution to our Welsh Keywords series – inspired by Raymond Williams’ Keywords – which offers contemporary perspectives on contested meanings of words in Welsh and how these shifting meanings continue to shape our society.

A little over two years ago I embarked on a visual arts project entitled ‘Dyfodiaith: Singing to an Unknown Future’ consisting of a video installation, Iaith Bwystnon, and a sound installation, Tafod Dadweirlled, developed for an installation at Chapter Arts Centre in Spring 2019. It imagines an isolated island where a hybrid Brythonic Celtic language has survived – evolving in ways we may partly recognise. With financial support from Arts Council Wales and Chapter I was able to collaborate with co-scriptwriter and language researcher Llŷr Titus, composer Samuel Barnes, actor Melangell Dolma, singers Gwenno Elan Healy and Lisa Angharad, cellists Kirsten Miller and Rachel Waters, filmmaker Eilir Pierce, visual effects animator Joshua Marshall, to name but a few.

About the author

Paul Eastwood is a Wrexham-based artist with a practice that explores art as a form of social production and cultural storytelling. He creates narrated histories and futures to investigate how place and objects can communicate cultural identities. Eastwood studied at the Royal Academy and Wimbledon School of Art and was the winner of the inaugural NOVA Art Prize, Wales in 2018.